Introducing English Linguistics

Varying definitions of meaning
English words: Structure and meaning
151

---

way for the father to tell his children to “hurry up.” This is not to suggest
that the words themselves are not meaningful, but rather that the full
meaning of the statement transcends the words that it contains.
Although most semanticists capture this two-way distinction, they do so
in different ways. In popular usage, the distinction between grammatical
and pragmatic meaning has been captured by, respectively, the notions of
denotation and connotation. Denotation relates to the dictionary sense of a
word, connotation the associations a word evokes. Thus, at the level of deno-
tation, a politician is an individual elected to public office (at least in one
sense of the word). However, increasingly the word has developed negative
connotations so that for many people, a politician is somebody who, for
instance, is not to be trusted and will say anything to anyone to get elected.
Lyons (1977: 50–6) argues for three types of meaning: descriptive, social, and
expressive. Descriptive meaning is related to grammatical meaning; social
and expressive meaning are two subtypes of pragmatic meaning. Social
meaning “serves to establish and maintain social relations” (Lyons 1977: 51).
Expressive meaning is more particular to the individual and characterizes
the particular meaning that individuals add to language when they speak.
Descriptive meaning, Lyons (1977: 51) asserts, “has been of central con-
cern in philosophical semantics.” For this reason, it will be the primary
focus of this chapter. And while many linguists and philosophers may, as
Lyons does, subcategorize pragmatic meaning, it is a separate type of
meaning deserving of separate treatment, as was shown in Chapter 3.
All words are composed of one or more morphemes. A morpheme is con-
sidered the smallest unit of meaning. For instance, the word dogs contains
two units that are meaningful: dog, which specifies a particular kind of
animal, and -s, which indicates the notion of plurality. Although all mor-
phemes are units of meaning, there are various kinds of morphemes.